There are a lot of lessons one could take from the 2012 Election. One fills me with hope: the neo-Confederate ideology that has run the Republican Party since Nixon embraced the Southern Strategy is dead. It is still quite dangerous (as any viewer of any zombie movie knows full well), but it is dead. In time, it has been done in by math, demographics and reality.

This must be extremely painful to the lot of ’em.

I expect the Republican Party and the Conservative movement to fracture. Like the malevolent evil that it is, I expect that neo-Confederate ideology will find a new home in some Conservative third party (perhaps ‘Libertarians’). Wherever it finds sanctuary, it is a force of racism and white supremacy that will plague America for a few more generations. And yet, as of last Tuesday, it will never again have the power it once had.

I agree with you in the long term Dennis, but I think the zombie Republican party will hang in until 2022. Barney Frank made a very cogent observation on TRMS the other night; if the House election had been held under the 2010 house boundaries, the Democrats would have retaken the house. It looks like we only took 8 seats. And there are not a lot of seats out there that will be easy to regain. Take a look at South Carolina or Florida, and you will begin to get an idea just how hard it will be to regain the House in the next few election cycles.

We may flip a few more in 2014, but the way the deck is stacked, 17 seats will be a tall order. And as long as Republicans hold one house of congress they hold enough power to fuck over the country.

This is not an ideology that will go quietly. Its proponents have plenty of guns, and worse (as Timothy McVeigh demonstrated). Ever since the 2008 election, they’ve lived for the idea that this election would be their chance to take it all back. Today there’s crashing disappointment, but in the weeks and years to come, the hate may re-congeal into something violent. Love to be wrong about this.

RICHMOND, Va. —
About 40 students at Hampden-Sydney College shouted racial slurs, threw bottles and set off fireworks outside the Minority Student Union within minutes after President Barack Obama’s re-election, officials of the tiny, all-male school said Thursday.
__
…The racially tinged incident is the second reported protest sparked by Obama’s re-election. A protest at the University of Mississippi in Oxford late Tuesday involved about 400 people who shouted racial slurs. Two people were arrested.

Watch for the Confederates to go full-throttle on voter suppression now. The antidote is to publicize the crap out of this issue, so that every time they pull their dirty tricks they inspire a bigger backlash of outraged people determined to vote against them.

Barney Frank made a very cogent observation on TRMS the other night; if the House election had been held under the 2010 house boundaries, the Democrats would have retaken the house.

Yep: NC is a prime case here: 51-49 presidential vote, but the Congressional delegation is going to be 9R-4D and the state leg. has a GOP supermajority in both chambers. They used some pretty damn good computers to draw that map.

And the state legislatures will remain laboratories of wingnuttery — especially of the neo-Confederate kind — because it’s easy for wingnut welfare shops to draft their laws in DC, fax them to the GOP leadership in state capitols, and see them rubber-stamped.

A national post-election survey commissioned by the Faith and Freedom Coalition last night found that the evangelical vote increased in 2012 to a record 27% of the electorate and that white evangelicals voted roughly 78% for Mitt Romney to 21% for Barack Obama.

The Republicans are sitting in the back seat of the car, terrified, as TeaDaddy rages behind the wheel, very drunk, sweating and quietly swearing to himself. Occasionally he swerves to avoid objects that don’t exist in this world, but in his mind only. The speedometer slowly climbs past 80.

At last, one of the back benchers pipes up…

“Where are we going, Daddy?”

“SHUT THE FUCK UP” roars TeaDaddy, his mind a boiling mass of confusion and rage. How could it have come to this? WHAT THE FUCK were they going to do now? And the horrible part is, he doesn’t know. Where are they going to go indeed?

“I wanna go home.” Noonan whines from the back.

“I SAID SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU LITTLE BITCH” TeaDaddy roars, not taking his eyes off the road as he backhands Noonan precisely across the face with a facility borne of long practice. She falls back, silent save for a few choked sobs, blood streaming from her nose.

“Daddy, what are we going to do?” whines little Brooks from the back seat. He’s still TeaDaddy’s favorite, in spite of TeaDaddy being pretty certain that he’s queer as a three-dollar bill. He makes TeaDaddy look smart, so he’s worth the hassle. He knows that kissing TeaDaddy’s ass when he’s in this kind of mood is the safest for all of them. TeaDaddy’s wrecked the car before. Granpa McCain had died that time. It hadn’t been pretty.

TeaDaddy wrenches the wheel hard to the right. It seems to be the only direction the car can travel in. Noonan screams.

There is no right to vote enshrined in our constitution. It is time to get moving on an amendment.

Er, the 15th Amendment:

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

This probably sounds over-dramatic, but I think Obama winning as well as the Dems holding the Senate will end up being one of those big bullet-dodging moments in history. It will be the kind of thing that the Harry Turtledoves of the future use as their divergence point.

Will it come roaring back? I’m not so sure. I think the big lesson here is that the GOP threw everything they had at this election, from the billions of dollars in ads to the constant personal attacks on the president to the racist appeals to the voter suppression, and not only did it not work, it backlashed. Minorities turned out in record numbers. We all love to scare each other with stories about the big, scary, political apocalypse that the GOP is cooking up in their secret labs (why else would P.O. find such a willing audience here?) but I think whether they succeed or not is incumbent on the Democrats. If we can keep turnout and registration going, I think we’ve got a chance of at least keeping our heads above water. We don’t have a presidential election in focus on in 2 years, so let’s start working on finding good candidates for house seats now.

I also think an undeniably improved economy and a successful effort to let people know the Republicans are lunatics will be our two strongest weapons. I think if ‘Obama improved the economy’ becomes something everyone knows, his support will go back to 2008 levels, and that may be enough to swing seats we wouldn’t expect. For the 111th congress, we had plenty of seats that were R+10 and R+15 on paper, so it’s not impossible.

As for concerns that the Supreme Court will torpedo the voting rights act, I won’t pretend to be a close watcher on that front, but I will say that everyone assumed the same thing in the run-up to the ACA decision. I remember the gloom, and it was palpable. And that worked out. I guess the million-dollar question is whether Roberts is convinced that he’d rather be a respected historical figure than a right-wing puppet, or if he thinks he owes the right a favor now. Or maybe Scalia’s arteries will give out on him before then. I’d be fine with that, too.

@Cermet: They can try to talk to Hispanics. Thing is that they won’t have as easy a time of it, definitely not as easy a time as they had with George W. Bush and his smattering of Spanish. If they go too far, they piss off the Tea Party, and the Tea Party decides that they go somewhere else.

I will stick to my thesis that the conservative movement as it was as a cohesive political force to be reckoned with, died the day Hank Paulson showed up hat in hand to congress, begging for rescue of the free unregulated market the right wing has championed the past 3 decades. Sold as some kind of mystical elixir that can cure all that ails the country..

We have been going through that process, and it is a process since that day. But enough voters have concluded the problem is bigger than the wingnuts are claiming, and most of them told exit pollsters they still hold GWB and republicans responsible for the wrecked economy.

Mitt Romney wasn’t a nominee pick from a healthy political party. He was a pathogen as the shameless salesman willing to sell his soul on any given day, to every single faction of the GOP, that is and was a recipe for disaster in a presidential general election.

I don’t know what is going to happen with them. But I am fairly sure that the 27 percenter nihilists as the current majority of the GOP, will have to be kicked out or otherwise tamed of their atavistic tendencies, if the republicans want to win national elections.

I think part of what this election proved is that our traditional GOP boogeymen are under certain circumstances impotent. They spent billions and billions of dollars on attack ads, and for nothing. They tried to suppress the minority vote and it completely backfired. Minorities voted at higher rates than in 2008. Someone up above just posted that the evangelical Christian turnout reached an all-time high and voted 4-1 for Romney, and Romney still lost. These guys aren’t invincible. The idea of a ‘permanent Republican majority’ based on white Evangelical turnout sounds ludicrous now. (BTW, I’m convinced Karl Rove freaked out on air because he knew-or thought he knew-that the Ohio vote had been bought and paid for, and he and Husted turned out to be wrong. If it had been Florida that was the deciding state, I think it would have been the same thing.)

And I think that if the GOP decides that voter suppression will be their chief weapon for Obama’s 2nd term, I’m convinced that our own turnout numbers show that we’re ready to make it a fight. Luckily for us, the DOJ is on our side. It might have just been throwaway, but I do wonder if Obama’s line and having to change the voting system so people don’t get stuck waiting in lines for hours is a warning shot to the GOP.

Looks like boner has come around for the reality and is schooling his class of moronic brats.

On a conference call with House Republicans a day after the party’s electoral battering last week, Speaker John A. Boehner dished out some bitter medicine, and for the first time in the 112th Congress, most members took their dose.

Their party lost, badly, Mr. Boehner said, and while Republicans would still control the House and would continue to staunchly oppose tax rate increases as Congress grapples with the impending fiscal battle, they had to avoid the nasty showdowns that marked so much of the last two years.

Meanwhile that beady eyed ratfucker, lyin’ voucher ryan

Mr. Ryan then went hunting and left Mr. Boehner to deliver his message.

Also, if the Tea party actually does split off from the GOP, not in some symbolic way but in an actual, running-its-own-candidates way, they’re toast. Absolute toast. Their coalition is fragile enough as it is and it wouldn’t survive being split in half.

The redistricting is a real problem that could slow the death of the odious right wing. What this country needs is someone to lead a revolt from within the party and divide it. The best way to abet that is by using wedge issues like immigration and climate change. That strategy has the added virtue of addressing important and neglected problems.

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

@redshirt: Well, maybe, but there’s also the possibility that there are AA evangelicals. They couldn’t all be WASPS, could they? Or, perhaps they could’ve figured out that the candidate and party which most adheres to the teachings of Jesus was the President and his party.

On a conference call with House Republicans a day after the party’s electoral battering last week, Speaker John A. Boehner dished out some bitter medicine, and for the first time in the 112th Congress, most members took their dose.

Oh, bullshit. The only one here that needs to take his medicine is Boehner. The House could have passed every bit of legislation that landed there last session with the caucus he had – but Boehner insisted that every bit of legislation that pass the House pass exclusively due to GOP votes. But there were plenty of votes for everything on both sides of the aisle, it’s just he would have needed some Dems to carry the day – and that was unacceptable and he wouldn’t bring anything to a vote that might have passed in that fashion.

I understand that the narrative would be that the Tea Party was irrelevant, or that he couldn’t control his caucus, or that the Dems would take credit for things, but boo fucking hoo. The votes were always there if he would just cut his caucus loose and bring things to the floor.

We had three explosive devices (nothing serious but not typical local kid stuff) go off in my North Mpls. neighborhood today. I called the FBI field office because my neighbor has one of the burnt out devices. We’re talking with them further tomorrow and with the PD. This instance in not typical. It was also the first and only time I’ve called the local FBI field office.

@Tripod: Yup. That’s why I am not so worried by all that gerrymandering. It’s the younger whites who are gonna ratfuck all that gerrymandered districts. If the dems play it right, we could even a blue house as early as 2016.

The GOP is not done. They almost won, if it weren’t for Superstorm Sandy and Christie’s Brutus act. Super PAC money sucks for statewide and national elections, but it worked great in congressional and especially state legislature races. There are at least 10 years of gumming up the works in the federal government while running the state government in more than half the country to make life miserable. Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio were testing grounds for the Conservative state. Every court setback shows ways to retune the language of voter suppression bills to make them harder to overturn. The beast is not dead. It is wounded and crazy, but still filled with a hideous vitality.

The funny thing about Saturday Night Live, and I don’t mean “ha ha” funny, more’s the pity, is that you can often see the thinking behind it, in this case “Hey wouldn’t it be funny to show Grant Wood’s American Gothic while they were posing for it, what went on, talking to the painter and deciding what to hold and so on?”

@pseudonymous in nc: Depends on how they drew the districts. It’s hard to draw districts so you have all safe seats and an overwhelming majority. Basically, you either get to draw a handful of R+4 seats or a bunch of R+1 seats. R+1 gives you a natural advantage, but it can be overcome… Like home field advantage

@Bill E Pilgrim: Yup, deeper the red bias, harder they fell. Also. Too. PPP needs to concentrate on quality rather than quantity. Frigging 71 polls ? They prolly thought that averaging would help them but looking at that graphic, they just ‘averaged’.

Remember, with the original Gilded Age, a lot of people already thought it was really fucked up by the turn of the century (hence W. J. Bryan and, more effectively, Teddy Roosevelt), but it wasn’t until thirty years later that we finally got the New Deal.

@Ajaye: Well, what they’re going to go after is Section 5 – the preclearance provisions that only affect some states and not all. And I’m sympathetic to that view. It strikes me as discriminatory. Either all states should be subject to preclearance or none should. Understand that I think the federal government should strictly regulate all federal elections – but it should be applied uniformly.

They almost won, if it weren’t for Superstorm Sandy and Christie’s Brutus act.

Uh, no. Obama didn’t go up in any of the most accurate polls from pre- to post-Sandy. He went up in the inaccurate ones – and you can’t draw any conclusions from inaccurate polls.

Romney was never close. He never led the EV count in any poll. He never led in the popular vote, except for the polls that were wrong. He never led in Ohio. He never led in PA. Obama won both the EV and popular vote in each of his elections by larger margins than Bush won either of his.

I expect that neo-Confederate ideology will find a new home in some Conservative third party (perhaps ‘Libertarians’).

Hasn’t that already happened? I mean, there’s a reason we call them “Republicans who smoke pot”.
Meanwhile, true civil libertarian (lowercase L) ideology is the domain of the Democrats. (Making Libertarian hatred of the Dems even more illogical and amusing, and especially revealing.)

I predict TX, AZ, SC and IN will flip blue in 8-12 years. And whites will play a major role in that.

I think GA’s an interesting one to watch, especially once the ACA’s exchanges become a reality. Lots of lower-middle-class white voters there for whom unexpected illness or a pre-existing condition is basically ruination, and they’re starting to get a sense of what it might be like not to have that looming anxiety about getting sick, and the reason why now has Obama’s name attached to it.

what they’re going to go after is Section 5 – the preclearance provisions that only affect some states and not all. And I’m sympathetic to that view. It strikes me as discriminatory.

I take your point, but this is one of the cases where I think the equivalent of profiling makes sense. If making states with a long tradition and culture of fair elections (like Minnesota and Oregon) is the price necessary to get preclearance from the South-Will-Rise-Again, then so be it. Except that the GOP House ain’t going to pass a law that does that, so if Section 5 gets thrown out, expect wingnut state legislatures to have a fucking field day.

Watching all of these Republicans talking about how they see now that they have to “attract” non-white non-older non-male voters, something tells me there’s going to be a period of utter hilarity coming while they try to figure out how to do that, like watching a performance of Up With People or your elderly aunt dressing up in a miniskirt or something.

It’s not cosmetic, fools, young/minority/female people are just not into you.

Pew Research has been looking at falling rates of participation in churches for a long time now, and the trends don’t look good for the Ralph Reed types.

Young people ain’t buyin’ it.

Among the youngest Millennials (those ages 18-22, who were minors in 2007 and thus not eligible to be interviewed in Pew Research Center surveys conducted that year), fully one-third (34%) are religiously unaffiliated, compared with about one-in-ten members of the Silent Generation (9%) and one-in-twenty members of the World War II-era Greatest Generation (5%). Older Millennials (ages 23-30) also are substantially less likely than prior generations to be religiously affiliated.

But generational replacement is not the only factor at play. Generation Xers and Baby Boomers also have become more religiously unaffiliated in recent years. In 2012, 21% of Gen Xers and 15% of Baby Boomers describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, up slightly (but by statistically significant margins) from 18% and 12%, respectively, since 2007. The trend lines for earlier generations are essentially flat.

The percentage of “religiously unaffiliated” people is steadily growing, and:

The religiously unaffiliated are heavily Democratic in their partisanship and liberal in their political ideology. More than six-in-ten describe themselves as Democrats or say they lean toward the Democratic Party (compared with 48% of all registered voters).

Romney was never close. He never led the EV count in any poll. He never led in the popular vote, except for the polls that were wrong. He never led in Ohio. He never led in PA. Obama won both the EV and popular vote in each of his elections by larger margins than Bush won either of his.

Agreed. The “Sandy won it for Obama” line already has the status of myth, and like all myths, it ain’t true.

Btw, the 15th amendment isn’t a right-to-vote amendment. This is the problem with the US Constitution’s style of expressing everything as “negative rights” (the govt. may not restrict the people’s rights to [x]). The right to vote for one’s government is a positive right that proceeds from that government, and to phrase it in negative-rights for is an ideological contortion.

I predict TX, AZ, SC and IN will flip blue in 8-12 years. And whites will play a major role in that.

When Texas becomes a swing state, be on the lookout for an intensive campaign by Fux, the right-wing media stooges and the gullible trend followers against the Electoral College. It will suddenly become the most heinous affront to Murkan Freedom and Liberty(TM) since the abolition of child labor.

Failing that, they’ll try to change the winner-take-all delegate system to proportional representation like Nebraska has now.

Not sure I can yet celebrate the demise of the GOP yet, but the finger pointing spree since the election does have folks saying that each of the Repub’s three main constituencies are to blame: the monied, the racist, and the religious. The “47%” comments hit a nerve among many people that the super wealthy are going to far. The racism and it’s role in turning minorities to the Dems en masse has been recognized as a long-term party concern. Even the never before failing pro-life agenda soured women with all the pro-rape comments from a bunch of old white guys.

As the GOP position necessarily evolves to try to limit losses for the next election, I can see at least one leg of the stool falling off to some extent.

Don’t kid yourselves, folks.. Racism—which is the fuel the present GOP runs on—is alive and well. You all heard about the half assed vote suppression schemes that the GOPers tried to run in Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio, which only sort of worked. But in states like Tennessee, where I live, they implemented a 21st century Jim Crow without so much as a whimper of protest. You gotta a a driver’s license or a (even an expired) hunting or firearm license—well you are good to go as a voter. But a University of Tennessee or veteran’s ID—provisional ballot if you are lucky. In other era, this was called a property owning requirement or a poll tax.

Look, Southerners just love them some Federal subsidy money. FDR and the New Deal is what brought the south out of the Third World, and without Medicare and Medicaid there would be no health providers in many rural Southern counties. Then there are the military bases and crop support programs . . .. . .

The redstates except for GA and TX (in good years) get 30 to 100% bonuses back on their Federal taxes (all paid for by blue Maker states like NJ, CA, NY, and MA). Southerners would bust a gusset if a Romney-Ryan admin acted to cut those back. And they don’t much care in general for carpetbagger vulture capitalists who send jobs to China like Bain has done.

The ONLY reason that white residents of the former slave states voted for Mitt by 20-50 point margins was that he is a rich white guy, and Obama is well, a colored half breed (which is actually worse than being black, since his white mother had sex with a Ni-clang. What all that Obama is a Kenyan socialist Muslim shit is about is your basic “ni**er ni**er” campaign, updated.

And so all the talk about being nicer to immigrants and women the next time is just talk. It is the racism, stupid. The GOP is the White People’s Party.

@MikeJ: But there’s no way to get added to the list for having a voting law overturned. There’s no way for PA or OH or to get on that list. It’s got to work both ways. Congress needs to just replace it with proper regulation of elections.

I would caution about the demise of the GOP. Even a dead bee can sting.

We’re going to have to do it ouselves. It will be a Long March. Success will not occur overnight. We will lose national elections again. But we can build a national organism of progressive culture that reaches into the every neighborhood, hamlet, and town in America. And we will have to do it ourselves, because neither a messiah nor a heroic man on a white horse will bring about sustained change.

If people think that voting is the end all of a representative democracy then they have no understanding of this great experiment in the human experience we call America.

I am not saying that Sandy and Christie actually caused R-money to lose, but the GOP will not be swayed to splinter or change. Nope to the conservative mind Sandy and Christie sank the election. There will be no reflection on the policies or demographics that led to defeat. I should throw in Mourdock and Akin, but their ‘gaffes’ were impolitic, not wrong. It is fine to put that sort of thing in the Party Platform but it is not said in public.
We eked out a victory in a presidential election year by busting hump and getting fantastic turnout. The repubs did not have a ground game, a horrific candidate, repugnant policies thrown in the spotlight and an ORCA sized fail whale of software and still got 48% of the vote. This does not inspire me that the GOP is impotent. 2014 can be 2010 all over again, but worse. Romney was able to lie with no charisma all the time. UNLIMITED CORPORATE CASH aside, congressional races are susceptible to large ad buys because they are so focused. Ann Marie Buerkle almost kept her seat in New York by running ads saying she was defending medicare from the democrats who want to defund it. Is Clinton going to stump for Maffei in 2 years? I don’t know if we will have the same enthusiasm in two years and we definitely will not have the intensity if we project a ‘permanent democratic majority’ vibe.

@Mike G: When Texas becomes a swing state we’ll have a dagger over the heart of the Republican Party, for true. Without Texas they’ll never win the Presidency again, ever. And this implies House/Senate gains for the Dems in Texas as well, which, again, can not be overstated.

Dem kill strategy should be to organize the fuck out of Texas. Free community centers, contra dances, baked bean suppers, you name it. Anything and everything to get Dems in Texas registered and organized.

There is one thing that a number of states could do and that is put an iniative on the ballot to put redistricting in the hands of a citizen commission. Yes, I know not all states have the iniative process, but for those that do, this would take it out of the hands of the politicians. It worked in California, we won four (at least) seats due to a neutral citizen commission drawing the lines rather than the politicians making back room deals to assure safe seats for all the incumbents.

I expect the Republican Party and the Conservative movement to fracture.

Nope. It’ll be the same. The Iron Law of Institutions posits that actors care more about their influence within an institution than its effect in the wider world. Christine O’Donnell, in a state of around 800K, won her primary with about 30K votes. Doesn’t take much for idiocy to continue to be enforced in GOP primaries.

No one has the incentives, the sway, or maybe even the inclination, to reform the party.

I expect the GOP will course-correct for whatever demographic problems they’ll have long term. I fully expect conservatives will beat the shit out of us in 2014, unless we can figure out a way to get our voters out in midterm elections.

@Amir Khalid: I also read that Matty Y thinks the AOS has no cards to play on the fiscal cliff debacle. I personally could care less. I just want there to be a budget come next March. The IRS is barely functional as it is, and we MAKE money for the government. We need the tools to do what is an increasingly more complex task thanks to computerisation and identity theft. We also flat-out need bodies.

Another big right-wing freakout of the moment is the polling that shows young people have a higher approval rating for “socialism” than they do for “capitalism”.

This is the backfire from the Fox rightards screaming “socialist!” at everything from Social Security to Obamacare to contraception and teaching evolution. Most of their age group approve of these things, so they conclude “socialism”, at least as they hear it constantly defined in the media, is not such a bad thing. Throw in decades of influence-peddling Wall Street “capitalism” where the 1% rig the system to hoover up more and more of the pie, while leaving them with skyrocketing tuition and lousy job opportunities, and it’s no surprise.

Until the Republicans lose an off-year election, the Southern Strategy will live on. The best we can hope for is some token immigration reform to win over Latinos. There will be no soul-searching until the Dems show they can turn out the vote for something other than a Presidential race, mark my words.

@Yutsano:
But your agency collects teh ebil TAXES! And besides, in right-wingers’ eyes, any government agency not involved in making war for the glory of USA! USA! USA! is der Sozialismus. And above all, if you pass a budget that lets sosialist agencies function, you’re operating the Big Government machine; not working to dismantle it, like a good conservative should.

@Amir Khalid: They also know we pay for teh Big War Machine, since they can’t put the whole thing on the national credit card without paying SOMETHING back. And there are nowhere near enough mineral rights to pay for their big shiny war toys. Mineral rights make up about 6% of the income stream of the US, a tiny amount through tariffs. The IRS gets the rest. And oh yeah my division of the government is in the Constitution. So they can suck it.

@PeakVT: I’d be sympathetic to the gloating argument if I didn’t keep hearing about how Obama’s election was the end of America, that everyone who voted for Obama just wants a handout, how winning 332 electoral votes is the sign of a dictatorship.

When Republicans stop acting like morons, I’ll stop gloating when we win. In other words, don’t hold your fuckin’ breath.

@MikeJ: I’m not gloating. But I’m not apologising either. A majority of the American people agreed with the Democratic vision this time around. That gives Obama four more years to enact his agenda. I did my celebrations, it’s time to get to work.

The Republican party has a problem. I think it’s very unlikely that it will issue in a third party movement, though. I think it’s far more likely that they’ll take it on the chin a few times in a row while refusing to face reality and then swallow some moderation so that they can win. They do like beating the left.

And honestly we don’t even know that they’ll lose next time. We just rightly think that things are a bit weighted to our side now, at long last; that doesn’t protect us from bad candidates or serious shocks of various kinds.

One way the GOP may be hoist on its own petard is if it does try to woo Hispanics with immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship. Without jettisoning the race-baiters from the party and softening on things like Obamacare & Social Security (unlikely), that will just end up locking in several more million votes for Dems in the long term.

People forget that several Repubs played prominent roles in moving the civil rights bills through Congress, because the party then became the party of racial resentment. Immigration reform could be a repeat of that

If enough of the big donors refuse to finance teabagger candidates, that might help. Mightn’t it?

Won’t happen. Adelsen singlehandedly kept Gingrich in the race. That’s where Citizens United is hurting the GOP – guys that otherwise might have run like Christie aren’t going to run if they don’t have their own billionaire. It’s a recipe for the crazies to take over.

Pre CU, there was nothing stopping a Bloomberg or a Romney or a Trump from self-financing their own candidacy. Post CU anyone who can get the support of one individual can take a realistic shot at the office, and if the voters go all red meat on one of these, they’re in the general. That’s insane.

I expect them to have a better than average chance next time, just on the “let’s give the other guys a chance for a while” platform. Combine that with the Dems running a candidate who almost certainly will have not been a community organizer.

Until the Republicans lose an off-year election, the Southern Strategy will live on. The best we can hope for is some token immigration reform to win over Latinos.

Latinos have been won over, as is clear from the overwhelming vote for Obama. You better be hoping for something more than “token immigration reform” to keep Latino support.

The old Southern Strategy has been neutralized. Romney carried almost all of the South, and still had nothing to show for it. For now, all the nonsense that keeps the reddest of the red states loyal to the GOP is viewed as laughably repugnant by a solid majority. The funny thing is that the Republicans are as disciplined as ever at getting their message out; it’s just that people can see through the lies.

And yet, as of last Tuesday, it will never again have the power it once had.

Too soon to tell. Some 57 million people voted for Romney, and conservative fear and resentment are running at a fever pitch. And if the Democrats fail to deliver, conservatives will see an opening to return to power, and will do everything they can to bring their bigotry back with them.

Dem kill strategy should be to organize the fuck out of Texas. Free community centers, contra dances, baked bean suppers, you name it. Anything and everything to get Dems in Texas registered and organized.

Agreed. But since there really is no functioning state-wide Democratic Party left in Texas this may take a couple cycles, or more. If the Dems can organize that then they deserve to rule for a generation.

Totally O.T., but way tou late for previous “what’s everyone up to” thread : Just (ok, a few hours / drinks ago) saw a doc on Big Star – “Big Star : Nothing Can Hurt Me”. If you are a fan, or just want to know what’s the big deal about a long-gone, never popular band from the 70’s, or just want to see a good music doc, or just love good music, see this if you can (they still need a distrubutor). Long, but well worth it, even for an audience full of hardcore fans who know “everything” about Big Star. Ok, thanks – sorry for the interruption.

We have some major work ahead of us for 2014. This isn’t over by a long shot. We need to continue to keep people aware of what’s going on. We might have to fund ads to highlight what is going on in congress.

Keep hitting the political ads even as we go forward. Highlight everything going on. When Republicans start making a nuisance, put out some political ads during prime time.

Careful about the Latinos. The one wingnut I still listen sympathetically to is a very nice and creative Cuban woman. She’s extraordinarily tolerant and interested in listening to other viewpoints, but she openly cites her experience as the child of a Cuban refugee as her visceral, emotional reason why she fights Democrats and anything to do with socialism (notably including Obamacare).

If you do a google search on “abuses of Castro nationalize” and read some of the wingnut stuff on the topic, it gives you a bit of a sense of what they’re scared of. It’s easy to look at, say, the military-industrial complex or the banking sector and see that the chances of capitalism being steamrollered here are zilch, but still: apparently a backlash that is too severe would be pretty nasty, and there is such a thing as ‘too severe a backlash’, and I see folks emotionally wanting such a backlash.

Democratic failure to think in lockstep should save us. We’re not really authoritarian enough. If we started peeling off teabaggers and having them flip ideologies and keep the extremism, then it might be a concern…

I say seek out those Cuban wingnuts and run stuff by them. We can’t assume ‘universal free healthcare’ automatically sounds good to everyone, when to a few subgroups it sounds like ‘Castro nationalized my industry and is indoctrinating children in schools’.

It’s all down to the ‘permanent X majority’ concept, screw that noise. I want Republicans that I’d actually have to consider hard about voting for. Fewer horrible deal-breaker issues, more ability to trust that they don’t just want to smash everything- moderation, in other words.

‘Permanent Republican Majority’ got us INTO this mess, let’s not base our plans on ‘Permanent Democratic Majority’ as if that would be some kind of cure.

@Brachiator: He’s right about the midterms, though. Dems gotta get their shit in order and get the 2012 turnout machine working in 2014. The GOP has every right to assume that 2014 will look like 2010. Looking out, Obama (or OFA) appears to be critical to winning.

We can’t only show up every other election.

But if we do win in 2014, then the southern strategy will be dead. The GOP already know that it’ll stop working – they just need to see evidence that it doesn’t work. We showed that in a high turnout presidential election, it’s dead. No evidence yet that the same will hold for a low turnout midterm. I expect them to run more-or-less the same play in 2 years.

Immigration reform is a tricky proposition for the GOP. They know they need to do it, and I suspect they will, but doing it will create more latino voters (possibly a LOT more) which might just extend the Dems advantage rather than the GOP earning anything out of it. That’s the real objection to the citizenship path. They’d be a lot happier with a permanent resident underclass. But I doubt that even citizenship buys the GOP much from latinos – they’ll know that the GOP didn’t champion the move. I’m not sure what the GOP can champion that the Dems are either ignoring or resisting. The important issues after that seem to be wages, jobs, voting access – generally all stuff that the Dems are going to deliver.

@Applejinx: Cubans are a small and unique population. Part of their GOP support also stems from resentment from other latino groups that Cubans got a citizenship path that was denied to everyone else.

Dems will have a hard time winning that specific population. Same holds for Taiwanese of a given age over Carter’s recognition of PRC and cutting relations with Taiwan. They’re still resentful over that move. Not a whole lot that Dems can do to win over those that hold that view.

I’m not sure they do. There’s a history of big swings back after the presidency switches parties – the losing party is fired up; the winning party is complacent. That won’t be the case in 2014, losing twice might take a bit of the fight out of the Republicans. Furthermore, 2014’s economy will (hopefully) look a lot better than 2010’s economy, and Obamacare can be sold as a more concrete proposal than back in 2010. I hope the Republicans assume that 2014 will look like 2010, but I don’t think it’s a sensible strategy for them.

South Florida’s large Cuban-American community, usually a solid Republican voting bloc, also voted for the Democrats in record numbers, according to exit poll data released by the Obama campaign.

Obama won 48 percent of the Cuban-American vote, and upset Romney in Miami’s Little Havana district, considered the heart of the Cuban exile community, where a survey of precincts showed Obama won 56 percent of ballots cast.

Mitt Romney wasn’t a nominee pick from a healthy political party. He was a pathogen as the shameless salesman willing to sell his soul on any given day, to every single faction of the GOP, that is and was a recipe for disaster in a presidential general election.

But Romney still managed to get frighteningly close to enough of the electorate to buy his snake-oil to win the election. Romney may be a pathogen candidate, but the political body itself is weak and diseased for it to not have rejected and overcome a candidate like him before the body got wracked with fever, aches, weakness and vomit.

The fracturing has already begun to some extent. Out in Arizona for the elections, I saw plenty of yard signs in which Republicans advertised themselves as the “Conservative” candidate, with no mention of the Republican Party.

Moe Lane at Redstate isn’t giving up on racism and dogwhistles that quick (via his Twitter @ Redstate):

moelane: #rsrh “Next time, the GOP will want less Karl Rove, more Lee Atwater.”

While it would be nice to think that we are seeing the Republican party in its death throes, IMO nothing could be farther from the truth. As long as these fuckers are breathing, they are going to be hating.

I foresee a doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on mean Bircherite deregulatory Confederatism in the Confederate and anywhere they can in the West.

Let’s not forget, this isn’t just about broad values and ideologies — there are real interests here, and concentrated power and wealth aren’t going to give up doing every damn thing they can now just because things may trend against them in the future.

And it wouldn’t be the first

The Confederate-American Bircherite Robber Baron Feudalists will aim to retrench anywhere they can — state by state, county by county, city by city, and there are nasty people in any location with whom they’ll collaborate.

These are a bunch of mean dopes led by comic book supervillains and funded by similar comic book evil billionaires.

It is good, though, that they did get a clear ass-whoopin’ on the national scale, though, because so many of them thought all of Real America felt their way and that they’d have enough time in power to fix what was wrong with America (‘I want my country back!’)

The Republican Party and conservatives in general are so totally invested in their ideological certitudes that if they continue to lose elections they will come to believe even more firmly than they do now that the problem lies not with them but with democracy itself. If voters continue to refuse to do what the right-wing sincerely believes in its epistemically-closed universe to be essential for America’s survival, we could be in for some serious political and social turbulence.

That is what they said in ’08. Didn’t the ’10 election tell us anything? When will we Democrats realize that one election victory doesn’t ensure nirvana? I also fear that without a Black at the head of the national ticket, we may have trouble with the GOTV effort in the future. Don’t forget the Republicans were able to gerrymander incredibly effectively, and that will impact many elections to come.

@Feudalism Now!: Zombies are dangerous, but they are still zombies. The fight is a long way from over, but Conservatives and the GOP will need to kick the neo-Confederates and the Southern Strategy to the curb if they hope to survive.

And even when the Confederate Zombies are kicked out of the GOP, they will do damage to America for a very long time. They are hateful, bloodthirsty and violent–always have been.

Romney, or anti Obamaism ran up the popular vote from the deepest red and southern states. My state, NM, is actually a good bell weather to what is happening nationally. In 2000, we had Gore winning the PV by about 500 votes, in 2004, it went to Bush by a similar ratio. Ditto for both Obama elections, this one about ten percent more votes for Obama.

A number of swing states have flipped from red/ purple to blue or lean blue, like VA NV, CO, and even Ohio, etc…etc…. With Obama winning those former red states by 2 to 5 or more points. The EC map is shrinking for the GOP and expanding for democrats. And the EC map is the only map that matters.

That doesn’t mean we don’t still have a lot of voters voting against their own interests, or voting tribal and race based over any other consideration. It does mean the trend is away from conservatism as currently manifested in the GOP, and more toward pragmatic liberalism.

And most importantly, more minority voting power, until the GOP starts to moderate on a lot of issues of tolerance and acceptance of those Americans that don’t look like them, or believe the same things all the time. And that doesn’t include the increasing hostility of the republican brain trust to dismantle the middle class to where even the staunchest middle American blue collar white guy takes notice he is being screwed by his own side. An empty stomach tends to focus the mind.

@Joseph Nobles: The Ohio Referendum Issues 1&2 for Redistricting Reform fell in defeat primarily because there was so little attention paid to explaining their importance to the public. The Democratic Party in many states, not just Ohio and Wisconsin, should have made an elemental issue of partisan gerrymandering districts. Gerrymandering is a simple concept and easily understood as commonsense. Sports references like: “Would it be fair if the team that wins a football game one week be able to redesign the football field for next week’s game?” or “Can the elected mayor in a city election draw new city limits and cut out the inner city projects?”

For me, one of the best things is young people/ new voters turning out, because it’s the end of a political myth. The CW was if you’re counting on new voters, you’re going to lose, but that is no longer true.

About midway thru election day we had someone send us a picture of the line to vote at a state university here. The state school is in a “bellweather” county in NW Ohio that Democrats have to hold to win. We were all just gaping at this photo, because the line was so long. That’s how much power they have with only 20% turn out. Those are new voters, because (obviously) time passes and the 2008 new voters are no longer in that particular line.

Another big right-wing freakout of the moment is the polling that shows young people have a higher approval rating for “socialism” than they do for “capitalism”.

Sometimes old people have a hard time remembering that young people are, you know, young. Because they’re still freaked out about the USSR, they haven’t fully digested the fact that “socialism” can’t be a scare term for anybody younger than mid forties or so.

In fact, the Paul Ryans and Sarah Palins are about the youngest demographic that can possibly care about that.

@Mike S.: Read it again and perhaps you’ll see that I wrote something other than what you thought you read. Take you’re time and perhaps you’ll get it the second, third or fourth time through…

@chopper: No, I don’t. I have no illusions about the danger of the wingnuts and the neo-Confederate ideology that has taken over the Republican Party. They will still do a lot of damage and some places in the Country will be under their thumb for decades to come, but it is a dead movement walking. And if we stay in the game this time (fight in the 2013 elections–NJ and VA–and fight in the 2014 midterms) then we can build on Tuesday’s win.

That’s why the Obama is Jimmy Carter nonsense never scared me. Young people here think Jimmy Carter is a humanitarian figure, which, you know, HE IS, unless you’re a pundit/highly paid consultant from the Reagan era.
Reagan was a long time ago.

My big hope is Democrats start selling health care in a cohesive, global way that isn’t tied to news cycles or whims of media celebrities. They built the public health payment system in this country, and it got more comprehensive with each pass.
This is all pieces of a whole, Medicare,
Medicaid, SCHIP and the PPACA. It hangs together. Picking it apart benefits conservatives, because then the can claim they had specific objections to one or another part, but really they had a broad objection, and it was to
EXPANSION and INCLUSION.
OPPOSED, they were. They fought like hell against SCHIP, which was a piece for children. They opposed children’s coverage. That’s extreme.

He’s right about the midterms, though. Dems gotta get their shit in order and get the 2012 turnout machine working in 2014. The GOP has every right to assume that 2014 will look like 2010.

The GOP has no reason to assume anything about 2014. The fear and resentment that spawned the Tea Party victories appears to have been blunted. Tea Party candidates and conservatives who openly advocated hard line positions had their asses handed to them.

On the other hand, if the Democrats govern timidly, or do nothing but concentrate on 2014 election strategy, they will gain nothing in the midterms. And won’t deserve anything.

But if we do win in 2014, then the southern strategy will be dead.

The southern strategy may not be dead, and it will never die, but it has been contained. And it is not just because of high voter turnout. It is because the Democrats peeled away GOP voters to a core of older (and some younger) angry white men. The post election Rachel Maddow program showed that even in some Senate and Congressional races that the GOP won, they lost the women vote by significant margins. And more women vote than men.

Some Balloon Juicers blather a lot about dog whistles. In this election, the Republicans openly appealed to racism and twisted sexual bigotry toward women and gays. This only served to drive voters away from the GOP. The Democrats now have to show that they have earned this loyalty. And they cannot just depend on Obama’s example or presence to do the job for them.

Immigration reform is a tricky proposition for the GOP. They know they need to do it, and I suspect they will, but doing it will create more latino voters, which might just extend the Dems advantage rather than the GOP earning anything out of it. That’s the real objection to the citizenship path.

Actually, if the GOP embraces immigration reform, it will hasten the destruction of the Republican Party. Wall Street Republicans only see Latinos as a source of cheap labor and have always wanted some mild form of immigration reform. But the irrational nativism and anti Latino racism of the Tea Party kept anything from happening.

If the GOP embraces immigration reform, it will drive angry white voters to the Libertarian party, or to a new third party, just as Civil Rights successes drove angry white voters into the arms of the GOP.

By the way, many Latinos couldn’t give a rat’s ass about citizenship; they just want the right to work here. In an ideal world, an economically strong Mexico, and a real North American Union in which there was freedom of movement between Canada, the US and Mexico would be the real solution, but that is never going to happen.

Also by the way, as another poster pointed out, Obama won the Cuban vote. Younger Cubans are abandoning the fantasy that they will ever be able to self-deport back to a pre-revolutionary Cuba. And thus, another GOP wet dream dies.

@👽 Martin: Going by Sam Wang’s analyses and the early flash polls, I think Romney was actually ahead in the presidential race for about an hour or two after the first debate, and close for about a week after that. But Obama had gotten back some of his lead and was safely ahead by the time Sandy hit.

You know, its very difficult to continue to make progressie change and be optimistic, build on your successes, if you always think that the other side has all the answers. No one is saying that there aren’t and wont’ continue to be significant challenges in moving forward. Only that we have successfully shifted the conversation and the focus. Will we have to keep it up and build on it? Yes — very much so. If you are not energized by what you saw on Tuesday, and just think of it as a fluke, it is YOU who would be in position of losing an important opportunity. You have to believe in the strength and validity of your own message and not be beat down with self doubt.

@McJulie:
I like this analogy but it cuts both ways. The Democrats can’t afford to relax their marketing campaign either once the “product” isn’t Barack Obama who managed to seamlessly unite in his person a lot of electoral identity issues. If our victory rested on an energized, multicultural base we can keep turning that base out only as long as our candidates speak for policies that excite that base, or manage to be identified with a (successful) two term President like Barack. In other words we can’t allow there to be any falling off of excitement and commitment to the Democrats in our base. We need to stop focusing on the illusory “centrist” and swing voter and market, market, market our entire party to a growing natural base.

Agreed. Very important and we must begin NOW to promote those policies and awareness building. Our constituency is still awake and newly aware of our power and opportunity.. we have to reinforce that awareness with policies and messaing that takes us forward…

We could be smarter. I was amused at Rachel Maddows breaking news a week before the election when she discovered OFA had been organizing around the union- busting in Ohio.

Everyone who was active in that knew it, DESPITE what blogs were saying. It was not politically convenient or smart to advertise the OFA role in that, so we didn’t. We wanted to win, and Obama is a polarizing figure, so the OFA effort was LOCAL. That’s what happened. That’s reality. OFA are responsible for stopping Ohio’s 2010 voter suppression law. That happened too. They did that.

@redshirt: I can’t believe Obama got 21% of the Evangelical vote. Doesn’t that go against everything they believe in?

I remember reading that some of the younger Evangelicals were reading their Bibles and said “Hey, wait. Jesus said to help the poor, not shit all over them. And not a word about teh ghey!” and when they mentioned it to their elders, got horsewhipped and locked in the Closet of Repentance for a couple of weeks.

I expect the Republican Party and the Conservative movement to fracture.

Movement conservatism (over 70% of the Republican Party) is rife with fissures, and each faction thinks that they are the ascending power that can ‘save’ the nation. The only thing holding them together is a shared, visceral hatred of Obama, and this is Obama’s last term.

The evangelicals had to drop their favoured candidate, Santorum, for the ‘greater good’. In exchange, they got nothing. Romney avoided social issues post-Akin (e.g. the RNC) and social issues cost the Republicans the under-40 vote, women, and a substantial share of the Independent vote. In swing states, the evangelicals are a net loss for the Party, just making things worse. And in the red states, they just run up electorally-useless margins.

If the evangelicals split, or were driven out, they would have 27% of the electorate. The problem is that they aren’t distributed well enough to win any electoral votes (or very few). But it would open the GOP up to women and younger voters. Also, the evangelicals could potentially draw significant numbers of minorities from the Democrats.

If the two Parties had to compete for the evangelical vote, the evangelicals would be far more likely to advance their agenda than if they stayed with the GOP.

“It’s time for the Justice Department to recognize the sovereignty of the states,” Brown said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “I believe the president and the Department of Justice ought to respect the will of these states.”

I’m not sure they do. There’s a history of big swings back after the presidency switches parties – the losing party is fired up; the winning party is complacent. That won’t be the case in 2014, losing twice might take a bit of the fight out of the Republicans. Furthermore, 2014’s economy will (hopefully) look a lot better than 2010’s economy, and Obamacare can be sold as a more concrete proposal than back in 2010. I hope the Republicans assume that 2014 will look like 2010, but I don’t think it’s a sensible strategy for them.

I, for one, am looking very forward to a highly energized President Obama pitching the full implementation of the Affordable Care Act during the 2014 election cycle.

…the neo-Confederate ideology that has run the Republican Party since Nixon embraced the Southern Strategy is dead.

More like “undead.”

No one should relax, even for a second, or you might find some right wing racist munching on your brains.

The racist approach will simply have to become more carefully targeted. It may not deliver what it once did, but in 2016, I’ll bet it will still be effective enough to deliver several individual states. The fact that the GOP has so many racists among its rank and file membership means that concerted racist efforts will still be made to reach those cretins.

I’m so happy to live in Maryland. The legislature has figured out a way to pretty much silence the Republicans in this state so we don’t have to deal with their dying breed of racist wingnuttery. The state is about 30% registered Republican, but they’ve been completely shut out of any representation in the House delegation thanks to smart gerrymandering. Other states should follow suit. With enough work they could be destroyed in any blue state and most of the purple ones.

don’t see here, with a quick ‘find’, that anyone mentioned the fact that laura ingraham has suggested the republican party return to said southern strategy, describing it as what brent bozell and bill buckley put together after goldwater’s big prez loss to sell the conservative message.

but of course no one at chris wallace’s table bothered to ask her just why exactly they took that message to of all places the deep democratic south.

They couldn’t all be WASPS, could they? Or, perhaps they could’ve figured out that the candidate and party which most adheres to the teachings of Jesus was the President and his party.

Despite Republican sacred writ, there is no law that an evangelical has to be right wing. There are Democratic evangelicals. No doubt there used to be a lot more of them. Jimmy Carter is an evangelical.

I’m so happy to live in Maryland. The legislature has figured out a way to pretty much silence the Republicans in this state so we don’t have to deal with their dying breed of racist wingnuttery. The state is about 30% registered Republican, but they’ve been completely shut out of any representation in the House delegation thanks to smart gerrymandering. Other states should follow suit. With enough work they could be destroyed in any blue state and most of the purple ones.

Yup. That’s why I am not so worried by all that gerrymandering. It’s the younger whites who are gonna ratfuck all that gerrymandered districts. If the dems play it right, we could even a blue house as early as 2016.

Yeah. I think the gerrymandering only delays the inevitable. Maybe even POs some folks. It does not save the GOP as it has been.